Cannery Row - Themes

2. Write about a theme from Cannery Row that you would like to discuss more about in future discussions. How does the author approach this theme? Why is this theme important in the book?

A theme from Cannery Row that I would like to discuss more is how the members of Cannery Row function as part of a bigger whole—an organism. But the part of this theme that I would like to explore is not how the organism comes to subsist through the citizens of Cannery Row but rather the function that Cannery Row inhabitants have for this organism. I believe that the theme of Cannery Row being likened to a living organism is well-understood and accepted, but, like in all organisms, there are tissues and organs that do more than others for the whole or are more important. To my first glance, Cannery Row seemed like a book that was written just to be written, that is, it shows you a world for the sake of letting you understand and know what happens there. Upon further analysis I saw the intricacies of Cannery Row and how Steinbeck created a sort-of biological book on the organism that is Cannery Row. This theme is important as we also have to look at the intricacies of the organism analogy to completely analyze and understand this theme. In Cannery Row following this analogy, who are those that add little to the functioning of the organism as a whole or, even worse, those that could be surgically removed without seriously impairing the operations of the organism? The author approaches this theme—indirectly, by creating the analogy between Cannery Row and organisms you can study. It stands to reason that the different parts of the Cannery Row organism can be identified through the book.

Cannery Row - AP Questions

1. Reflect upon the process of responding to multiple choice, close reading questions about Cannery Row and the prologue. Also, reflect upon the process of creating your own questions and discuss how you wrote the questions.

Having to create a set of multiple choice questions for an excerpt from Cannery Row was much more… time-consuming than I anticipated for two reasons: the excerpt had to contain sufficient material from which I would be able to draw questions and the questions for the various pieces of the excerpt had to be tricky enough that they would not be intuitive, that is, I would have to look for a passage that allows for multiple interpretations and choose questions as well as answers that are complex enough to throw the reader in for a loop.

Once I had chosen my excerpt I started constructing my questions. I began by choosing one of the three question types we were to use (interpretation, comprehension, literary device) and answering it in detail. I wondered how an AP test maker would build their answers and set that as my benchmark for how difficult I wanted my questions to be. I began to cut down on the length of my answer so as to make it a little bit vague. I wouldn’t want the specificity of my answer to give it away immediately so I opted to either remove the parts of my answer that made it seem too detailed or showered my false answers in other details to make them seem appealing. After building my main answer, I started to think of what wrongful impressions I had of the part of the excerpt I was answering when I first read it. My logic was the following: if on the first reading I would have jumped at this answer, then it was worth putting as a false lead.